There’s a juxtaposition in every moment that HXRY brings into musical existence. A fabric tethering a listener’s reminiscence to the most golden of R&B eras past, bridges a gap, too, to the most experimentally electro-nuanced of R&B’s productive futures. Part of it – the part that makes any R&B fan believe that maybe they’ve heard this song before, sometime in the late 90’s – is in his register, where crystalline highs and bellowing lows seamlessly breathe with the full scope of loving, lustful, and lamenting human emotion. Part of it – the part that makes any R&B fan hope that the future decades of the craft brim with such a carefully curated take on digitized synth strokes and bass still founded in the styling’s past – is rendered newly timeless with the possibilities of modern do-it-yourself-ism in production. And all of it is tied together with the necessity of connecting to a listener’s sensitivities and emotionality with a keen understanding of storytelling and songwriting. For it, HXRY is a poet. To wit, Reflections is his epic. The Chicago R&B transcendentalist shines with a new album – a debut album – that’s title seems to nod – even inadvertently so – towards reflecting on R&B’s past while looking towards its future; reflecting on his own stories told throughout the project; reflecting on the process and the chapter that was.

 

“A long ass year of figuring out who the fuck I was. Thank you for listening to my story. It means so much to me to have this out and to close this chapter of my life,” he wrote on his socials to commemorate Reflections’ release. “Stay peachy,” he signed off an interview at the onset of 2020 when we last had the opportunity to speak in depth. And in between the two quotes, a lot of change occurred – a lot of reflection thus necessary. Reflections happened in that space.

 

Get it rite opens the album, just as it opened the red-lit set at his Chicago release party playing Reflections – as it should be played – from top to bottom. The opening track is a nod to his seemingly unending battle against doubt and insecurities in the love and lust he so bottomlessly – and better than anyone else today – explores with his music. But also perhaps like the furry dice hanging from the rear-view mirror, Get it rite is there to ensure that Reflections is off to a start built on good omens. Whatever the reasoning, HXRY pushes forth from the album’s opener never once getting it wrong. The wavy synth strokes and perfectly orchestrated bass drop amidst his pleading vocalism sets anyone listening off on a half-hour long path where the only pause taken happens to replay a song or two or eleven.

 

Of the eleven, four are familiar. izudown first touched down between the Winter release of his 2020 EP, PIECE OF MIND and the tail end of Spring. Unendingly emotive and summertime sweet, the track is a warm-weather duet brimming with lovey harmonies from he and longtime friend, collaborator, and R&B force in her own right, ALIAH (FKA Alliyah Allah). safe2say is, safe to say, another futurist R&B hit, emerging at the tail end of last Summer to the tune of a new emotional direction for HXRY. A broken hearted, sick-of-trying-to-make-it-work kind of Neo-Soul meets Neo-Funk ballad for the exhausted by love, it’s emotionally fluent, connecting with listeners on yet another new plane. Favorite Song explores the same end of his emotional range at a new depth, in a dark, painful pit of the broken heartedness in being played over and over again. And then there’s ROCKYOBED. Take a guess where this one is headed, and you’re right, it’s one of the most successful and experimentally righteous sex anthems in recent memory.

 

What is perhaps most daunting about Reflections is not only the emotional range HXRY so effortlessly explores through eleven tracks, but that he ultimately ties them together both stylistically and through the lines of his story being told. Track to track beyond the leading singles and through all six new songs and intermissionary snippet, Teknikal Issues, pain and emotion at its deepest to passionate explosions in the opposite direction, HXRY proves yet again, and with his debut album, that he is cut of a cloth both tethered by reflection towards his stylistic predecessors and free to explore and experiment boundlessly by way of the rangy and refined set of skills he brings to a modern R&B scene prioritizing risks being taking. For any fan of R&B past or future, old or new, HXRY is a both a bridge between the epochs and one of our moment’s most innovative creators.